Estimated 500 pounds of trash removed. Plastic and styrofoam food and drink containers were the most common items. Here are the students with their haul. Zot Zot Zot!

Winter is here and our lake is icing over. Tomorrow it will be frozen solid, but today the ice was still thin, and some of the lake was still ice-free. I figured today was the last day I could take the kayak for a ride and go annoy the duckies 🙂 Now that the ice is back, the mallards are only days away from migrating.

Fun fact: a heavy Wilderness Systems fishing kayak pretty much stops dead when the ice is over 1/2" thick. I guess kayaks aren't terribly competent icebreakers...

Also, the pedal drive really, REALLY doesn't like ice floes: at some point, I wanted to power through thicker ice, but I had to bail out and go back to open waters because the plastic propeller was getting dangerously close to breaking, and the entire pedal drive mast was getting pummeled. I really didn't want to find myself paddling out of a freezing lake.

Also, something I had never heard before: when it was really quiet and the waves trailing the boat hit the thin sheet of ice, the ice made an eerie screechy sound, like the wind hitting a taut wire or something. You can hear it in the video at 5m38s and 6m15s. It must be the ice flexing I suppose.

A short jaunt to West thumb geyser basin, sadly no activity viable from the water. Great view of mountains and clouds across the water on the far shore.

OC by photographer @Vandals_handle@lemmy.world

By photographer @Vandals_handle@lemmy.world

This is the follow-up of this video:

I like to sneak up on the ducks and the geese when the lake is quiet. Sometimes I get pretty close.

Unfortunately, I can't share higher resolution 360° videos because of WebGL limitations in most browsers, so the ducks aren't very visible. But they quack real good 🙂

Trying my kayak's new side camera mount on our lake this morning at 5am. I love those still, windless days that turn the lake into a mirror. It's so quiet and peaceful.

Now if only I could find what the hell is creaking in my seat... 🙂

EDIT: I found out what’s creaking: it turns out corduroy rubbing on steel tubing is really noisy. I installed pieces of terrycloth between the seat’s fabric and the frame, and now it’s dead quiet.

I have a Wilderness Systems Recon 120 HD fishing kayak. I've never fished from a kayak (yet 🙂): I bought it mostly to do 360° nature photography. So I know next to nothing about fishing kayak gear.

My kayak came with two side rails to mount accessories. From what I could read, there isn't really a proper standard for those rails. Mine have the following dimensions:

I found 7mm rails for sale on Alibaba. So at least some kayaks use rails that are different from mine.

I looked around on the internet for camera mounts that would be compatible with my rails. I found a few manufacturers (Yakattack, Yakgadget, Cajo...) and none of them seem to indicate what kayaks their products are compatible with - implying that they universally mount on any kind of rails.

My questions are these:

• Are those rails standardized - formally or de-facto? What are the standards?
• Do the accessory manufacturers supply different bolts, or adapter plates, so their products can be mounted on all kayaks?

In the end though I ended up making my own camera mount. 360° cameras have special requirements for their mounts anyway, so mine will work better than anything on the market. And It's trivially easy to modify a 12mm hex head bolt in the lathe to make the head thinner and put a 3/8-16 UNC photo tripod thread on it instead. It costs nothing, and more importantly, I'll have it tomorrow when I go out on the water instead of waiting 2 weeks for a commercial product to arrive.

This is what my homebrew camera mount looks like:

Our small lake discharges into a very shallow and narrow stream. Our old rowboat simply can't get there. But the new kayak has a very low draft and it can enter the stream - although I do have to retract the prop and the rudder, and use regular kayak paddles. People rarely go there, so it's a bit wild.

Then I went check out the fish ladder at the other end of the lake, but it's been fenced off for some reason. Too many people fished there maybe.

The new kayak has arrived.

A handheld Garmin GPS that didn't even have maps, a portable XM radio receiver, and a 12mp Olympus pocket camera (probably 5mp for video).

Me and two others completed this trip today, with slightly rougher conditions than I anticipated, but nonetheless a successful trip.

One of the cool things about this paddle is it's just under 20km on the water, but only two km to get back to the start point to retrieve your vehicle

This is usually interesting but ugly. I don't know why the locks are open today, but its cool.

Most people think canoeing is an old thrown away tired hobby, so does this River Cowboy.

(I am kidding about bashing canoes, my Wenonahs are the most meaningful works of art to me I own!)

A blast from the past. Some of the finest flat water kayaking you will find.

Back again ...

In french, we call this kind of start where you jump in the river "embarquement à l'américaine"... I wonder how you call this in english ?

Water used to power Oregon infrastructure. I love the ruins.